


The Chase

by SnackerJack



Category: Gravity Falls, ParaNorman (2012)
Genre: First Meetings, Friendship, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 22:08:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnackerJack/pseuds/SnackerJack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe, Dipper thought, hurdling a fallen log and losing his hat in the process, just maybe, he should have left the stupid book in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Chase

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr and written for a {now aborted} twenty-five day fic challenge. 
> 
> Parapines is fucking adorable in any way, shape, or form. You can read this fic as friendship or pre-slash, whichever floats your boat.

Maybe, Dipper thought as he hurdled a fallen log and lost his cap in the process, just maybe he should have left the stupid book in the tree.  After all, it hadn’t done anything but cause him problems all summer.  An ominous growl thundered from the brush and he forced his legs to carry him a little faster.  His muscles were screaming in protest; he’d already covered at least half a mile in a sprint, and his hairy friend showed no sign of slowing down. The book in question was secure in his vest pocket, but there was no time to take it out and peruse it in the hopes of finding some sort of useful information.

 _Think, think_.  He’d only skimmed the entry once, and he was getting nothing but brief flashes of information.  _Tall_ -well obviously.  The thing had more than five feet on him.  _Furry-_ understatement.  From the short glimpse he’d gotten, he was being chased by a moving shag carpet.  _Territorial_ \- another no-brainer, as he was _still_ running.  _Thick, serrated teeth, hands capable of tearing apart rocks (or nosy kids), omnivorous..._ what was he forgetting?

Preoccupied with trying to picture the page rather than pay attention to the increasingly dangerous here and now, the toe of his sneaker caught on an unseen root—“Augh!”— and he pitched forward into a small gully where he made a rather impressive splashdown in the creek at the bottom. He flailed a moment, coughing and spluttering as water gushed from his nose, before finding purchase on the rocky creek-bed and heaving himself back to his feet.  One hand clutched at the book under his vest like a talisman; the other, he flung up in front of his face in some vague hope that it might prevent his head from being ripped off. 

But no.  Nothing grabbed him, nothing growled, nothing came running down the gully looking for tasty city-boy flesh.  The woods were quiet, the sun spangled across the water.  Birdsong filtered from the canopy.  Slowly, Dipper lowered his arm, heart-rate beginning to return to something resembling normal.  Of course, that was when something slammed into him from behind.

*~~*

“Mabel, look at this!”

His twin looked up from her knitting, a bright flash of interest crossing her face.  “What’s up?”  Catching sight of the book, the interest caught and took hold.  “Are we under attack?  What is it this time?  Fairies?  Zombies?  Oooh, an army of zombie fairies?”

Dipper’s eyebrow climbed toward his hairline.  “You just want to see fairies, don’t you?”

“Tiny hands, Dipper,” she said solemnly.  “Tiny hands and butterfly wings.”

“Okay,” he agreed, having heard far stranger things just that morning over breakfast.  “If I see any, I’ll let you know.  This is even better though, look!”  Mabel set aside the knitting needles and Dipper plopped down on the couch, holding out the book.  “Page 94.”

Paper rustled.  The familiar sounds of car doors, tourist feet in overpriced hiking shoes, and Grunkle Stan’s familiar schmooze filtered in through the front window.  “Welcome, welcome folks, step right up and prepare to be amazed!  Right over here, we have a very special admission fee box....”

“I don’t get it,” Mabel said.  “What’s so special about this?”

Dipper reached over and tapped the pages.  “I finally found something the book is wrong about!”

She glanced at him, somehow managing to pull off a sort of fond scepticism.  “You don’t believe in them?”

“All those blurry ‘pictures’ and still no real evidence? No hair for DNA testing, no real footprints, nothing definitive _and_ all those costumes they sell?”  Shrug.   “Please.  It’s just a hoax that exploded everywhere.  Besides, look how the lake monster turned out.  This is just another thing like that.”

“But everything else in here has been true. Why not this?”

He waved his hand. “They don’t exist!  Stop being the reasonable one.  It’s weird.”

An impromptu staring contest followed, each one trying to out-do the other in term of Serious Faces before they broke down in giggles.  “Come on,” Dipper managed, snatching the book back and extricating himself from the couch and Mabel’s massive piles of yarn.  “Let’s go see.  If you’re right, I- I’ll...” He cast a look around and landed on the half-finished sweater sleeve, done in a resplendent lilac.  “I’ll wear one of your sweaters for a week.  No complaining.”  Mabel wavered, the click-click of her needles slowing.  Dipper grinned.  “I’ll let you pick which one.”

A truly devious smile spread over Mabel’s face, eerily similar to the one she had worn when facing to the gnomes with a leaf-blower.  Dipper tried, and failed, to hold back a shudder.  _Why did I say that?  WHY DID I SAY THAT? Abort, abort!_ It almost came as a relief when she shook her head.  “I don’t know.  The book says they’re kind of dangerous.  I don’t want to get my arms ripped out.  I need my fingers to knit and play with Waddles and to defend myself from Gideon.  You can’t tickle people without fingers, Dipper!”

“Okay, okay,” he said, slipping the book back into his vest.  “I guess I’ll go see if Grunkle Stan needs any help then.  You sit here and think about the opportunity that you just passed up.”

“Please,” Mabel scoffed.  “I have pictures of you doing the Lamby dance.  I don’t need any help mocking you.”

“Wait,” Dipper said, alarmed.  “You have _pictures_?  _Where?_ ”

“I think I hear Grunkle Stan.”  Her fingers never slowed.  “He’s calling for you.”

“Mabel!”

She wiggled the needles in an approximation of a wave, already humming to herself.

“I’ll find them,” he promised, stalking towards the door.  “Search and destroy.”

“No, you won’t!” she called, and Dipper left the house in a huff, hands shoved deep into his pockets and mumbling useless things under his breath.  He wasn’t sure why Mabel had never had an embarrassing costume haunting her past {probably because Mabel was so chipper she just didn’t _do_ embarrassment}, but he strongly suspected that the universe was conspiring against him to never let him live it down.  _And now it’s in my head!  Agh!_

Halfway across the parking lot, he found himself looking east into the woods.  “They’re _not_ real,” he said again.  Because they just _weren’t_.  That was his story, and he was holding onto it until he got some good, hard proof.

“And here we have some local culture in the form of some gen-yoo-en arrowheads.”  Grunkle Stan sounded pleased.  And why shouldn’t he be?  Dipper and Soos had spent an entire rainy day last week carving them out.  Dipper still had the band-aids on his fingers to prove it.

So much for helping Grunkle Stan.  The old man sure didn’t need any help swindling.  Dipper could hear the ooh’s and aah’s from here.  He glanced again at the forest, at the looming trees and the shade-dappled bushes, and then he was off across the lot and under the canopy, the book a comforting weight inside his vest pocket.

 _They aren’t real_.

*~~*

Dipper screamed – _augh they’re real they’re real okay they’re real!-_ and staggered forward at the sudden impact, fetching up against a boulder hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.  He gasped, scrabbling at the rock until he could brace himself and spun to face his attacker, fists raised.

“I’m sorry!  Are you okay?”

Dipper paused.  That didn’t _sound_ like something that was ready to eat him.  Cautiously, he wiped the water from his eyes, pushing aside wet hair in order to see better.  The action revealed a tall, pale boy about his own age in a red hoodie, with wide blue eyes and a shock of black hair that made him seem about a foot taller than he actually was.

They stared at each other in silence for perhaps ten seconds before twin cracks sounded, one on either side of their little gully.  In tandem, both boys looked up over each other’s shoulders.  Two sets of eyes widened.  Two hands rose.  Two fingers pointed.  And two voices called out a warning: “ _Yeti!_ ” 

Dipper moved first {later, he would attribute this to the instinct of fight or flight- _flight- **flight**_ that he’d picked up over the summer}, snatching the other boy’s wrist and pulling him downstream.  “Come on, come on, come on!”

They fled.

The so-called escape was far from graceful.  There was no time to climb up the steep slopes of the gulch back to level ground, not with two yetis charging after them. Sun on the water, while pretty enough, concealed an uneven creek bed choked with forest debris, some of which was submerged and nearly impossible to see.  The current alternated between barely there and sucking hungrily at their legs.  And of course, fear has this habit of making people clumsy.

Before they’d gone twenty yards, Dipper’s foot disappeared into a hole and he barked his shin against a hidden rocky shelf.  Startled, he let go of the stranger’s wrist and flung his hands out to break his fall, landing hard and yelping as his palms scraped across rock.

The other boy skidded to a stop and darted back to wrap one hand under Dipper’s elbow; the other twined their fingers together and pulled.  Blood welled from a dozen scrapes and he was limping, but at least he was back on his feet and moving. For the moment, adrenaline was all he needed to keep going.  With his longer legs, the stranger could easily have raced ahead.  Instead, he matched Dipper’s new painful pace, casting constant looks behind them.  “Where are we going?”

 _We_.  Dipper decided then and there that this guy was his new best friend.  In between gasps for air, he managed a wheezy, “West,” and a vague swipe of his hand that turned into a flail as he overbalanced. He’d studied all of Grunkle Stan’s maps when they’d arrived, and even though they were all incredibly out of date, he remembered this stream cut pretty close to the Mystery Shack.  Maybe the yetis would be warned off when more people were around.

They never got to find out.

They splashed around a corner and came face to face with an impassable web of broken branches, deposited there for what had to have been the past fifty years.  The sides of the gorge in this section of the stream were taller and much sheerer, the creek narrow, deep and quick.  Climbing the walls was out of the question, and trying to swim under the branches ran the risk of getting caught on something and drowning.  All in all, it was a very effective trap.

Growls echoed through the little canyon.  The boys froze in their frantic inspection of the branches, exchanged a resigned ‘well, we tried’ look, and turned.

Up close, the yetis were somehow even more intimidating.  Thick, square heads perched atop massive shoulders.  Eyes sharp with intelligence glittered from under a protruding brow.  Their fur was so tangled and matted it resembled reddish-brown dreadlocks.  And their teeth, well.  Dipper tried not to linger on those.  He took a breath.

“Hi.”  A wince, and he tried again.  This time, he sounded a little less like a squirrel on helium.  “Hi.  Look, I’m really, really sorry about trespassing in your territory.  I’ll never ever do it again, I swear.  _Please_ don’t eat me.”  He shot a glance to his right.  The other boy was pressed so tightly against the makeshift wall that there had to be branches poking him in at least four really uncomfortable places.  “Or him,” Dipper added quickly.  “I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t eat him either.”

The yetis exchanged a glance of their own, matted fur swinging as they moved.  Dipper waited in agonized silence.  Did these things even understand English?  Whatever they heard, they must not have liked it, because they turned as one and roared, the force of it managing to blow even the other boy’s strange hair straight back.

The boys yelled and abandoned all sense of propriety.  {Simply put, they clung to each other and shrieked like a couple of teenyboppers at a Bieber concert.}  This went on for several seconds before either of them realized that they were not, in fact, dead, and that the fearsome roars had dwindled into loud guffaws.

“Did’ja see their faces?”  The laughter increased.

Dipper cracked open an eye and was treated to the bizarre sight of two walking shag carpets high-fiving each other before doubling over in helpless mirth.  “Wh-what—“

“You were like, aaaagh! and he was all, ahhhh!” chuckled one, voice climbing several octaves as it imitated them, throwing up its hands in what Dipper sincerely hoped was an exaggerated impression.

“Yeah,” the second one chimed, pretending to clutch at its friend’s shoulders with hands big enough to palm a beachball, broad features contorting in an expression of terrible surprise.  “Man, it was great!”

Dipper came to the abrupt realization that his own hands were still fisted in the other’s shirt and that there were thin arms circling his shoulders.  His new friend must have realised it too: they both went bright red and released each other.  Dipper pulled at his soaked clothes self-consciously and the other boy’s hand went up to rub the back of his neck.  His hair had recovered, standing up more than ever.  All of this only served to make the yetis laugh harder.

“Sorry, dudes,” the smaller one managed, “you don’t pass up an opportunity like that.  Don’t get lots of visitors out here.”  It paused, took in their dishevelled appearance and frowned.  “Hey, no hard feelings, right?  You _were_ in our territory.”

Dipper took a mental inventory of himself: clothes torn, limping, bleeding, still coming down from probable cardiac arrest, and compared it against those teeth.  ‘Smaller’ was still terrifying.  “Nope.  That was totally my bad.  We’re cool.”

The yeti nodded and turned to the stranger.  “We cool?”

The boy’s voice was low, inherently polite in how soft it was.  “Yes.  I’m sorry.  I didn’t know I was trespassing.  It won’t happen again.”

Mollified, the yeti reached out and plucked the boys from the creek, one in each hand.  Dipper’s breath caught in his throat, but the grip was careful, gentle even.  “No problem, dudes.  Thanks for the exercise.  Come back anytime.” It deposited them on top of the canyon wall without any apparent effort.

Dipper’s knees buckled and he sat down hard.  This put him at eye level with the bigger one, who began digging through its dreadlocks.  “You dropped this,” it said, producing a familiar blue and white hat and depositing it in Dipper’s lap.

“Uh, thanks,” Dipper said, eying the long strands of fur that had come with it.

The yeti tipped them a salute and headed back up the stream with its buddy, gleefully re-enacting the chase complete with high-pitched pleas for mercy and much wringing of the hands.

“Are... are you okay?” the other boy asked as the yetis disappeared around the corner.

“ _Hobbies include pranking intruders by chasing them_ ,” Dipper recited.  “I remember it _now_.”

“Um...”

“Never mind.”  He clambered back to his feet and offered his hand.  “I’m Dipper Pines.  Thanks for, you know, not leaving me to die.”

“I’m Norman.  You’re welcome.”  Norman’s handshake was tentative, like maybe he hadn’t ever done it before, or kind of like he wasn’t used to people touching him.  Or maybe he was grossed out by how filthy Dipper’s hand was.  Really, it was hard to tell. “Do you live here?”

“Just for the summer.  My great uncle runs the local tourist trap.  C’mon, let’s go.  I’ll lend you some dry clothes.”  He sighed.  “I have to go put on a sweater.”  Limping, he set off through the trees.  He counted nine seconds before Norman caught up, hands deep in his pockets and shyly offering to help him balance on his good ankle.

Maybe, Dipper thought, squishing through the forest in wet shoes and listening to the soft footsteps of a new friend, just maybe, finding the book hadn’t been such a bad thing after all.


End file.
